Following my Bliss
I am writing this on January 1, 2020. It’s the first day of a new year, a new decade, and for me, a new adventure.
Well, not exactly new.
A long time ago, just out of graduate school and some 2,500 hours into a five-year process of becoming a counselor, I sat down with my supervisor and announced that, while I enjoyed working with clients, there was something more pulling at me. She asked me what and I said that I saw myself talking to an audience. “What would you talk about?” she asked. I didn’t know.
Well, I finally know. I’ve actually been talking about it for eleven years now — in this very column.
My Bliss
The late, great mythologist Joseph Campbell famously exhorted his students to follow their bliss. “If you do follow your bliss,” he said, “you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.”
My bliss is the soul. I love the way it works. I love reading about it, teaching about it, talking about it. I love to help people discover something more. This column has provided a place both to develop and share my thoughts on this subject: to discuss matters of the soul and also why soul matters. And now it’s time for me to follow my bliss and embrace my long-held vision.
The Door
Beginning this month I will be hosting a year-long series, SOUL MATTERS LIVE!, a once-a-month gathering for libation, conversation and transformation: what used to be called a “salon.” (A certain someone admonished, “Don’t use the word ‘salon’!” but that’s really what it is … and I don’t mean for hair.)
The Soul Matters Series will be held at Rellik Winery on Old Stage Road on the first Thursday of every month from 5:30-7pm. (The cost is $10 at the door with a percentage of proceeds going to Southern Oregon Humane Society.) I will briefly share some thoughts about how the soul reveals itself and invites us to greater expansion through various lenses — money, loss, purpose, success, illness — and then open it up for a lively, engaging discussion.
My intention in launching this series is very simple: to follow my bliss and engage in real and meaningful conversation that connects us with our deeper selves, with one another, and with the world. I want to provide an antidote to our current environment of unprecedented speed, stress, superficiality, narcissism and division. I want to elevate the conversation and to inspire living a deeper, richer, more meaningful life.
I also want to meet you all — in person! So, I hope you’ll join me, in this roaring new decade, in expanding your mind and heart and soul and becoming more of who you came here to be. I promise you good company, great wine, real conversation and alpacas.
Who said personal growth couldn’t be fun?
The Grab & Go Grief Kit: A Workbook to Help You Understand, Navigate and Heal Your Grief is now available as an ebook at www.katherineingram.com. Beautiful print copies are available at Amazon.com, Rebel Heart Books, or through the author. Contact kate@katherineingram.com.
